Life of a Legend

Billy the Kid—born Henry McCarty and later known as William H. Bonney—was a slight, quick-smiling youth whose short life (likely no more than twenty-one years) became the crucible for one of the most enduring legends in the American West. Though his earliest years remain murky, his name enters the firm historical record in New Mexico in the 1870s. What followed in Lincoln County would not only define his fate but also ignite the mythology that still surrounds him worldwide.

By late 1877, Billy had drifted into Lincoln County, a place already primed for conflict. Here he found work with the ambitious English rancher-merchant John Henry Tunstall, who—aligned with attorney Alexander McSween and cattleman John Chisum—challenged the entrenched power of L. G. Murphy & Co. and their allies. On February 18, 1878, Tunstall was run down and killed south of Lincoln by a posse that included men tied to his rivals; the next day, Billy and other Tunstall hands were sworn as deputies by Justice of the Peace John B. Wilson. They began calling themselves “the Regulators,” vowing to seek justice for Tunstall’s murder—a vow that plunged the county into open war.

Retaliation came swiftly. In early March, the Regulators captured two of the men they blamed—Buck Morton and Frank Baker—and killed them on the trail between Roswell and Lincoln during an alleged escape attempt. Territorial Governor Samuel Axtell then voided Judge Wilson’s authority, branding the Regulators outlaws and transforming a feud into an all-out struggle for power.

Lincoln, the county seat, became Billy’s stage—and his trap. Before sunrise on March 31, 1878, Billy and several Regulators slipped into town and took cover around Tunstall’s store on the main street. When Sheriff William Brady and four deputies walked past later that morning, gunfire erupted from behind the corral wall: Brady and Deputy George Hindman fell dead, Billy was nicked, and the Regulators vaulted onto their horses and fled into the hills. In a single, stunning public burst of violence, Billy—now unmistakably linked with Lincoln—was set on the path that would define him forever.

The next months hardened both sides. After the gun battle at Blazer’s Mill on April 4, where Regulator leader Dick Brewer was killed and the famously tough “Buckshot” Roberts mortally wounded half a dozen men while holding off the group, the Regulators scattered and regrouped. As spring turned to summer, skirmishes with Sheriff George Peppin’s forces dotted the county, the U.S. Army’s role seesawed with changing orders, and Lincoln’s Hispano communities—harried by posse depredations—increasingly aligned with McSween’s faction.

Then came the five-day Battle of Lincoln (July 14–19, 1878). McSween, Billy, the Regulators, and dozens of local allies fortified buildings along the village street—McSween’s home on the west end, the Montaño Store in the center, and the Ellis Store to the east. For days neither side broke through. On July 19 Colonel Nathan Dudley marched troops from Fort Stanton into town; by late afternoon, McSween’s house was set ablaze and the men inside were surrounded. As the fire raged, Billy took command and led a desperate breakout through the smoke and gunfire toward the Bonito River—one of the most famous escapes in Western lore. McSween and three others were killed as they tried to surrender; the war’s center collapsed, but Billy emerged alive and more notorious than ever.

The war’s aftermath kept Billy tied to Lincoln. He drifted between sanctuaries at Fort Sumner and the Pecos country, but Lincoln remained the legal and symbolic axis of his story. In 1879 he even sought a path to clemency, secretly meeting Governor Lew Wallace and agreeing to testify about the brazen street murder of attorney Huston Chapman in exchange for a pardon. Indictments followed, but the promised amnesty did not; courts aligned with the old ring held the upper hand. By 1881, tried and convicted for the murder of Sheriff Brady, Billy was ordered returned to Lincoln to hang.

That return to Lincoln cemented his legend. Brought to the new county courthouse (the former Murphy & Dolan store) in April 1881, Billy was shackled in a second-floor corner room—ironically the old bedroom of rival L. G. Murphy—and watched day and night by Deputies James Bell and Bob Olinger. The arrangement, the room, even the sightlines from the windows are details that would be retold for generations.

On April 28, 1881, with Sheriff Pat Garrett out of town and Olinger across the street at supper, Billy persuaded Bell to escort him downstairs to the privy. On the return up the stair, he clubbed Bell with his irons and shot him as the deputy fled. Moments later, Olinger—alerted by shots—rushed into the courtyard. Billy appeared at the second-story window holding Olinger’s own 10-gauge shotgun and fired, killing him instantly. After nearly an hour working at his leg irons with a miner’s pick, he collected guns from the armory, mounted a horse, and rode west out of Lincoln into the sunset—his last and most famous escape.

The end came two and a half months later, when Pat Garrett shot and killed him at Pete Maxwell’s house in Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881. In death, Billy’s connection to Lincoln only deepened: the courthouse escape, the long street where Brady fell, the ash-scarred ground where McSween’s home burned—all became touchstones for visitors tracing the footprints of the Kid. The place and the person fused in public memory: Lincoln was “Billy the Kid’s town,” and Billy the Kid was Lincoln’s most famous son-in-legend.

From there the story grew beyond New Mexico, beyond the United States, and out into the world. Newspapers sensationalized his life immediately after his death; over the next century and a half, biographers, novelists, and filmmakers returned to him again and again. Silent films, mid-century Hollywood Westerns, revisionist dramas—each era re-cast the Kid for its own anxieties and aspirations. Stage and radio dramatizations, even ballet, took up his tale. Songs, paintings, comics, and video games have kept his image circulating, instantly recognizable in hat and bandanna, youthful and dangerous, a blank screen for our romantic ideas about rebellion and freedom. The result is rare for a historical figure: a truly international folk icon, resonant from Europe to Asia and far beyond the Pecos.

Why Billy? Partly, it’s the narrative architecture Lincoln gave him: a friend murdered, a community split, a war in the streets, a miraculous escape from a burning house, then that audacious courthouse breakout with its indelible image of the Kid at the window. Partly, it’s the contradictions—courteous and charming, yet lethal when cornered; loyal to friends but operating outside the law. And partly, it’s the way the story never quite closes: competing testimonies, missing records, and the enduring debate about the Kid’s motives and morals invite each generation to make its own Billy. In that sense, Lincoln is both the scene and the symbol—where a flesh-and-blood teenager became a legend, and where the world keeps coming back to measure the distance between history and myth.

Today, Billy the Kid stands with the most recognizable figures in global popular culture, proof that stories born on a dusty street in a small New Mexico town can echo across continents. As long as people are drawn to tales of defiance, danger, and daring escapes, Lincoln will remain the heart of Billy the Kid’s legend—and the Kid will remain, unmistakably, an international icon.